Tell Tale (2 page)

Savage slipped out of the house unnoticed. She drove from Plymouth to the outskirts of Newton Abbot and a large park and ride, slotting her car into a bay, the vehicle anonymous amongst hundreds of others. Being spotted here, being seen with the man she’d arranged to meet, was a definite no-no. She got out of her car and looked around until she saw the Range Rover. She walked over and opened the door.

Kenny Fallon turned and looked at Savage as she got in. ‘Unfinished business, Charlotte. Is that what this is?’ He reached for the ignition and started the car. ‘Or are we just going over to have a recce?’

Unfinished business.

Yes, you could call it that, Savage thought. Only the business was personal.

The Range Rover glided out of the car park and onto the main road heading for Paignton. Fallon’s hand went up and rubbed his goatee beard.

‘Well, Charlotte?’ He glanced at her and the hand moved from the beard to stroke his huge mane of white hair. The hair tumbled down to well beyond his shoulders. Plymouth’s premier gangster might have resembled a sort of cuddly Hell’s Angel, but in Fallon’s case appearances were definitely deceptive. More than one or two rivals had misjudged the man’s intelligence and guile and not all had lived to regret their mistakes.

‘I just want to see him, that’s all,’ Savage said. ‘I’ll decide what to do afterwards.’

‘Right.’ Fallon chuckled. ‘Ask him if he’ll say sorry and then kiss and make up? After that maybe send each other Christmas cards every year.’

Savage didn’t respond. She stared at the traffic rushing towards them on the other side of the road. Headlong. That’s what it felt like sometimes. Her family had been wronged, Clarissa killed. Nobody punished. How could that be right?

‘Whatever.’ Fallon spoke again. Took one hand off the steering wheel and patted her on the knee. ‘Uncle Kenny will sort things for you. Mind you, considering who the killer is, we’ll need to go careful. You don’t go messing with the Chief Constable’s son.’

When Savage had discovered the truth, it had at first seemed unbelievable. But then, turning things over in her mind, it had made more sense. How, for instance, the driver of the car which had hit Clarissa had managed to avoid detection. The police had known the make and model – a Subaru Impreza – yet they hadn’t been able to track down the owner. That Simon Fox was behind this failure to find and implicate Owen, was in no doubt in Savage’s mind. The trail must’ve been covered up, records obfuscated, perhaps even officers told to keep quiet.

A few minutes later and they were on the outskirts of Torquay, the Range Rover purring through a recently built estate. Neat little lawns with brick-paved driveways stood in front of two- and three-bedroomed houses. This was the preserve of newly formed families, the first or second step on the housing ladder. Owen lived here with his wife and young children. Did he sleep easy at night in the serenity of his suburban idyll? Or did he toss and turn with worry, Clarissa Savage haunting his dreams?

‘There,’ Fallon said, his head turning to the left as they drove past a house with a red door, a car sitting on the driveway. Not an Impreza; a Ford. ‘Happy families, hey?’

Fallon drove on and pulled up a short way along the road. Savage craned her neck to look back. As she did so the front door of the house swung open and a young woman appeared holding a baby in her arms, an older kid of four or five by her side. She stepped out of the house, closed the door, and went over to the car. Savage turned away as the woman busied herself with strapping the baby into a car seat, while the other child climbed in.

This wasn’t what she had been expecting at all. She needed to hate Owen, to see him as some sort of demon. Instead Savage was wondering how on earth she was going to go through with what she’d planned.

‘Can’t stop long, Charlotte,’ Fallon said, nodding through the windscreen to where a woman had raised her head from a flower bed and was paying them rather too much attention. ‘My motor. A bit flash for round here. Time to move on.’

Move on.

Could she? There had to be some sort of resolution, some settling of the score. Or did it go further than that – maybe stretching to something approaching vengeance? She wasn’t sure what she wanted any more.

‘Go,’ Savage said. ‘Just fucking go.’

Fallon raised his eyebrows, then put the vehicle into gear and eased forward. The road was a close, at the end a turning circle. Fallon manoeuvred round and headed back past the house. Owen’s wife had by now reversed into the road and she drove off, with the Range Rover following.

‘We could tail them,’ Fallon said. ‘Her and the kiddies. Find out where they’re going. Might be useful if we need to come back and give them a bit of a scare.’

‘No!’ Savage thumped the dash. ‘My argument is with Owen. We leave them alone, got it?’

‘OK, love. It was just a bloody suggestion.’

‘Look, Kenny, it’s not that I’m ungrateful for what you’ve done. Finding out who did it, tracing Owen, all that. But I’m the one who has to make the decision as to what to do.’

‘Sure.’ Up ahead the Ford indicated left. Fallon drove straight on. ‘But you’re going to make him pay, aren’t you? After all, it would be a shame to waste all the effort me and DS Riley put into finding him.’

DS Darius Riley.

Working off his own bat, he had followed a lead provided by Fallon. The lead had led to Owen via a breaker’s yard and a dodgy car body repair shop. Riley was part of the problem, part of the reason Savage had spent so many nights lying awake trying to decide what to do. If Riley hadn’t been involved she was pretty sure she’d have done something by now. Something stupid.

Savage watched the Ford disappear down the side street.

‘It won’t be wasted,’ she said. ‘And I do mean to make him pay. I do.’

‘Well then, let’s go and find the lad shall we?’ Fallon slowed the Range Rover and pulled in at the entrance to a brown-field site where the gates to a half-completed development hung shut for the weekend. Savage stared at a big yellow digger and then at Fallon as he reached across and opened the glove compartment. ‘But first …’

‘What are you doing?’

‘This.’ Fallon pulled out something wrapped in an oily towel and plonked the parcel on Savage’s lap. ‘A present from Uncle Kenny. Birthday, Christmas, whatever.’

Savage felt the weight of the object on her legs. Knew what was inside the towel without looking. ‘Kenny?’

‘Untraceable. A full clip. More if you need them but one is all it takes.’

‘Shit. I don’t know if—’

‘Think on it.’ Fallon engaged first gear and eased the car back onto the road. ‘My old man always told me regrets are for losers. He was right. Winners don’t have doubts, do they?’

‘No,’ Savage said as she folded back the rag to reveal the automatic pistol. ‘I guess they don’t.’

Then she picked up the weapon and slipped the cold steel into her jacket pocket.

DS
Darius Riley stood on a desolate stretch of moorland some five miles to the west of Fernworthy Reservoir. Apart from the track he’d driven down and the dark granite of a couple of nearby tors there was nothing but grass, low scrub and heather in all directions. Not for the first time since his arrival in Devon some two years ago, he reflected on the way his life had changed since then. South London seemed a very long way away, his Caribbean heritage even further.

For a moment Riley looked east where, far away, something hung in the air above the moor, hovering like a kestrel. But he knew the object wasn’t a bird. The smudge was a helicopter. Call sign NPAS-44. Air Operations. The helicopter was looking for the missing Hungarian girl, and there’d be people on the ground too. He shook his head. That’s where the action was. Officers hunting for clues, piecing the evidence together, coming up with theories. He gave a silent curse and turned back to the job in hand.

‘Crap.’ That from DI Phil Davies. Pissed-off too. He articulated Riley’s thoughts. ‘Call this police work? I don’t. We should be over at the reservoir or knocking on a few doors and unsettling some of the local nonces. Sort it, Darius, because I want to get back home in time for Sunday lunch.’

Davies turned and strolled away, hands reaching into his pocket for lighter and fags. Davies was something of an enigma. With his lack of respect for regulations, a well-worn face with a more-than-once broken nose, cheap shirts and aftershave and even cheaper jokes, the DI appeared to be a dinosaur from a previous age of policing. Davies was known to associate with various members of Plymouth’s criminal classes. ‘In the line of duty’ was his excuse. ‘Lining his pocket’ was how Riley saw it. But there was another side to Davies. He was the main carer for his wife, disabled after a riding accident. Riley rated her as one of the most attractive and graceful women he’d met. The contrast with Davies was unsettling.

Davies trudged away with a cigarette in his mouth, leaving Riley to continue.

‘Are you sure this wasn’t natural causes?’ Riley said to DC Carl Denton, walking in a circle around the body so he could view it from all angles. ‘Something getting at the corpse? A stray dog or a fox?’

‘Sorry, sir. The pony was slaughtered.’ Denton’s eyes moved to the rear of the animal. He reached up and scratched the pronounced scar on his cheek. ‘And worse.’

‘Tell me you’re joking?’ Riley said, wondering what his old friends on the Met would say if they could see him now. The sick jokes would be coming thick and fast.

‘No, sir. He’s been interfered with, something shoved up his rectum and the genitals cut off. No way a dog did that. Anyway, what about those burn marks on the ground?’

The burn marks were apparent in several places, piles of white ash surrounded by black earth and scorched grass. Boy racers up on the moor for a party, Riley had thought at first. But the positioning of the fires was too uniform. Five of them. Straight lines had been scratched in the earth from each fire to the ones opposite and a circle had been drawn through all the points too. The result was a pentagram with the dead animal in the centre.

‘Jesus,’ Riley said, shaking his head and then laughing at his use of the word. ‘Or not.’

‘Not, sir.’ Denton seemed unamused at Riley’s quip. The lad knelt at the head of the pony and peered at the neck, where the jugular vein had been severed. A pool of red-brown earth showed where the animal had bled out. Flies buzzed, flitting from the blood to the neck. There was already a whiff of something bad in the air. ‘Not Jesus by a long way.’

‘We’ve had this before though, yes? Animals being tortured?’

‘Sort of.’ Denton looked up at Riley and then stood. ‘But not like this. We had that deer with a crossbow bolt through the head in Plymbridge woods a while back. There was a horse shot with an air gun last year. Then there was a pony slashed in the genitals over on Bodmin Moor. The animal survived though. Not like this one.’

Denton stared past Riley, his eyes roaming the vista of moorland, farther away, a tor rising to pierce the blue sky. The poor lad looked shell-shocked, Riley thought. He knew Denton had been off sick for a couple of months. ‘Gone mental’ was the squad room gossip, but as one of the few people Denton confided in, Riley knew better. Denton had become infatuated with DC Calter but she’d been having none of it. A bunch of flowers bought as a Valentine’s present had been returned with a polite ‘no thank you’. An invitation to dinner had been rejected. Riley reckoned poor old Denton would have been OK, had a close relative not died soon after. Rejection followed by loss had pushed him over the edge and into full-blown clinical depression. On his return to duty he’d gone on various training courses and had come back to a new position working as a Wildlife and Countryside officer in DI Maynard’s newly formed Agricultural Crime Squad. The role was a largely solitary one and Riley wondered if Denton was coping with the isolation. At least Denton was his own boss. Riley and Davies came under the direct control of Maynard, and the DI never failed to let them know he was in charge. Thankfully Maynard was off on his annual birdwatching holiday, and for a couple of weeks at least Riley had a little more freedom.

‘So is this of interest to the ACS or not?’ Riley said. ‘Only we’ve got some sheep rustlers to catch.’

Denton turned back to Riley, not catching the irony. ‘Could be if we want it. Those other incidents were down to kids or bored city folk. “Having a laugh”, they’d call it. This is something different. I wouldn’t have thought the pentagram was the kind of thing some kids would think up. I reckon we’ve got something much more disturbing.’

‘You’re talking about the occult? Animal sacrifice? I thought that sort of stuff belonged in movies.’

‘That’s your job to find out, sir. If the ACS’s remit extends that far.’

‘Shit.’ Riley shook his head again. He and Davies had been stuck with Maynard for the best part of six months. The sheep rustling case the pair of them were working on was to be their last one, Detective Superintendent Conrad Hardin having belatedly decided Riley’s talents were wasted in the ACS. ‘I guess it does, although I’m not sure what Maynard’s going to make of all this. Especially if it means a bit of covert ops watching a bunch of gothic types frolicking naked under a full moon.’

Denton didn’t smile. ‘The animal’s been brutally slaughtered, sir. You’ve seen what they did to the rear end. It’s not a joke.’

‘Sorry, of course not,’ Riley said. ‘We’ll get on it. You’ll give me a written report and let me know if you find anything else, OK?’

Denton nodded, then Riley turned and walked away, leaving the lad staring down at the corpse. Davies stood over by their car. He dropped his fag and stubbed the butt out on the ground.

‘Any good? I know I was moaning earlier but if this case can get us away from those bloody sheep for the rest of the month I’ll bite.’

‘Carl reckons some kind of ritual took place. Not sure it’s our bag or one for the RSPCA. Depends on whether it goes any further than this I guess.’

‘Ritual?’ Davies grinned as he opened the door to the car. ‘You mean orgies and nude chicks on altars? Right up my street.’

‘Don’t mention that to Carl, sir.’ Riley went round to the driver’s side and got in. ‘He’s a wee bit sensitive on the issue.’